"Let anyone without sin cast the first stone"

I read this chilling article in the Washington Post today-- there's a very good reflection and summary here. The issue at hand is accidentally leaving children in cars... and how the parents who have done this don't fit any particular kind of profile, just a common pattern of stress, tiredness, and some interruption in the regular schedule of the day that fools the memory into thinking they have already dropped the kid off at daycare.

One thing that struck me when I read the salon.com commentary was remembering the first time I heard of such an incident (because you do hear of them, maybe once every couple years) after my daughter was born. She wasn't very old, and I was still very sleep-deprived all the time, and I just thought "wow, that could happen so easily."

The spiritual issue I see in all this is that so many people, some of those interviewed for the original article, and still more who commented online, seem very certain that they could never make such a mistake. They think that it means a parent who forgets about his or her child in the backseat of a car is a terrible person. The salon.com article pulls out a quote from a psychologist about why people feel the need to demonize others like this:

We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.

For me, I guess the central spiritual question is about compassion. I have no trouble feeling compassion for parents who accidentally leave their children in the backseat of a car. But I do wonder what "sort of people" I categorize as "monsters" because it makes me feel better about myself.